I was taught this too growing up in rural america. Did it myself at some land my grandparents had.

Best explanation I’ve heard for why it “works” is that when looking for places to first install pipes the location tends to be obvious or intuitive, so then years later when someone needs to find it again we naturally trend to the same rough area, pull out those stupid rod things and when they randomly cross there’s a pipe there cause we’re already standing in the general right spot. Get a high enough success rate and our brains start to think there is causation to the correlation.

For me, I view Apollo as the highschool quarterback winning the homecoming game.

In the context, its a great achievement. A lot of time, effort, and luck all came together at just the right moment to create an entertaining spectacle. The school is all happy and celebrating, students will remember that moment for years to come. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that big of an achievement since everyone there will move on to bigger and greater things, except they won’t have a student body cheering them on.

I think saying the Apollo program is one of the greatest achievements of mankind falsely puts it on a pedestal and forever sets up all other achievements as being lesser. Makes us all feel like anything that isn’t chasing that glory isn’t worth it. It’s an achievement for sure, but not the biggest. If I had to give the greatest achievement in space technology to anything, I’d give it to either GPS or GOES.

Short answer: it’s not that we don’t have the technology, its that we don’t have a reason to. With very few exceptions, if you can do it on the moon you can do it on earth or in Earth orbit

Long answer: in the space industry/field the moon is incredibly boring, relatively expensive to get to, and adds an extra step of logistics to an already complicated mission profile. Most space related technology advancement efforts have gone into doing things in orbit and there is more to do there than on the moon, it’s logistically simpler, and cost is orders of magnitude less. Stuff is still advancing there, think Hubble vs James Web, GPS 1 vs GPS 3, the entire GOES system. In terms of technical challenges, they’re far more interesting than anything on the moon, but it’s not as flashy/headline grabbing so it’s not talked about much.

The US going to the moon in the 60/70s was a rare combination of a win for scientists, politicians, and the people. The political incentive went away since as the USSR space program collapsed so too did political pressure to continue to put men on the moon and “prove 'Murica is better than those damn commies”.

In modern times the political incentive is returning with the continued efforts by China to do more stuff in space so we get the Artemis program, but the incentives aren’t that strong which is why the program has moved so slowly.

To me 16 is long haha.

I usually end up running with 16 characters since a lot of services reject longer than 20 and as a programmer I just like it when things are a power of two. Back in the Dark Times of remembering passwords my longest was 13 characters so when I started using a password manager setting them that long felt wild to me.

I do have my bank accounts under a 64 character password purely because monkey brain like seeing big security rating in keepass. Entropy go brrrrrrrrrrrr

I’ve used cloud based services for password managers for work and “self host” my personal stuff. I barely consider it self hosting since I use Keepass and on every machine it’s configured to keep a local cached copy of the database but primarily to pull from the database file on my in-home NAS.

Two issues I’ve had:

Logging into an account on a device currently not on my home network is brutal. I often resort to simply viewing the needed password and painstakingly type it in (and I run with loooooong passwords)

If I add or change a password on a desktop and don’t sync my phone before I leave, I get locked out of accounts. Two years rocking this setup it’s happened three times, twice I just said meh I don’t really need to do this now, a third time I went through account recovery and set a new password from my phone.

Minor complaint:

Sometimes Keepass2Android gets stuck trying to open the remote database and I have to let it sit and timeout (5 minutes!!!) which gets really annoying but happens very infrequently which is why I say just minor complaint

All in all, I find the inconvenience of doing the personal setup so low that to me even a $10 annual subscription is not worth it

Jesus dude, what brand TV do you have?

My LG issues a few hundred blocked requests throughout the day with heavy usage. I’ve never seen it wake up and phone home (my Nintendo Switch does it every hour for some stupid reason)

Combination of anti large company sentiment + people feeling entitled to get things for free if I had to guess. It also usually feels wrong when a corporation threatens a lawsuit over a single person since the US court system heavily favors the person with more money and it’s probably a true statement to say that Nintendo has more resources than the lead dev.

Modern Vintage Gamer on YouTube had an interesting take in that by stifling emulator development now it will hurt the industry in the long run because Switch exclusives will become increasingly difficult to play once support ends (an argument I myself don’t find all that compelling)

Nerrel on YouTube has a well put together and researched video on emulation where at least in the US it’s been tested in court several times that emulators are legal, but obtaining the code for the emulators to run is almost always not since you usually have to make a copy and that violates the publisher’s right to copy

For graphics, the problem to be solved is that the N64 compiled code is expecting that if it puts value X at memory address Y it will draw a particular pixel in a particular way.

Emulators solve this problem by having a virtual CPU execute the game code (kinda difficult), and then emulator code reads the virtual memory space the game code is interacting with (easy), interprets those values (stupid crazy hard), and replicates the graphical effects using custom code/modern graphics API (kinda difficult).

This program is decompiling the N64 code (easy), searches for known function calls that interact with the N64 GPU (easy), swaps them with known valid modern graphics API calls (easy), then compiles for local machine (easy). Knowing what function signatures to look for and what to replace them with in the general case is basically downright impossible, but because a lot of N64 games used common code, if you go through the laborious process for one game, you get a bunch extra for free or way less effort.

As one of my favorite engineering phrases goes: the devil is in the details

The ham radio thing makes me so sad, it really does seem like a dying hobby. But when I took my test the club sponsoring it had guys there who immediately berated me for using a practice test guide and getting a cheap piece of crap radio. Like yeah, I know it’s a terrible radio, but it was $70 with the practice guide and I’m a poor af college student. That little radio lasted me years and I only bought a new one cause it’s battery died and I couldn’t find a replacement